George Lucas talks Indiana Jones

George Lucas is making me even more excited about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull over at MTV Movies Blog.

May 22, 2008!

That’s coming up quickly, you know.

And!

Thanks to Field Agent Graham, we’ve got some exclusive comments from Dr. Love at California State University Northridge about the film’s titular skulls:

The Crystal Skull in the movie apparently is one attributed to Lubantuun. However, there’s no evidence that it actually comes from that site.

Norman Hammond send around a brief note last week about the skull:

The “Mitchell-Hedges Skull” was in Sydney Burney’s collection in London in 1936, published in “Man” that year by Braunholz and Digby in short separate pieces. The skull came into M-H’s possession around 1944 by purchase, and was mentioned in his autobiography “Danger My Ally” (1954) as”the rock-crystal Skull of Doom. How I acquired it I cannot say…”.

Only after M-H’s death in 1959, when his adoptive daughter Anna (now of Kitchener, Ontario, if still alive) inherited it, was the skull placed at Lubaantun, by her assertion, unsupported by any evidence. There is no proof that she was at the site when she claims (and Gann would have certainly mentioned it if so), and her story of how and where it was
found varies from telling to telling.When I did an Austrian TV film in about 1979 I got the chance to meet her and to look at the skull (which is a very nice, genuine crystal skull of unknown age and origin, with no evidence of having been in Central America, or indeed the New World generally before 1959). She claimed then that the two drilled holes at the bottom of the jaw, made with a metal drill to hold it in place on pegs in its box, were there when she “found” it…